Polar Raises $10M Seed Round, led by Accel, to Transform the Payments Infrastructure for AI-Native Merchants

Polar, the payments infrastructure company for AI-native SaaS companies, has raised a $10M seed round led by Accel to transform payments for the next generation of developers. Angel investors including Guillermo Rauch and Jared Palmer (Vercel), Paul Copplestone (Supabase), Tobi Lütke and Harley Finkelstein (Shopify), Michael Grinich (WorkOS), Thomas Paul Mann (Raycast), Anton Osika (Lovable), Jorn van Dijk and Koen Bok (Framer), Zeno Rocha (Resend),Steven Tey (Dub), and Sébastien and Alexandre Chopin (Nuxt) also participated in the funding. The investment will be used by Polar to expand its team, build the next generation of billing primitives for developers, and grow its community of developers and operational relationships globally.

A new generation of talented developers are creating, shipping, and scaling AI-native SaaS businesses with global potential. These developers are passionate coders, but monetizing their software and scaling it internationally is often the main pain point. If you’re a lean developer team expanding rapidly, understanding and managing your global sales tax liabilities can become an even bigger headache.

While there are a number of modern SaaS payments solutions they haven’t been built for the next generation of developers and AI-native software. The days of implementing payments in minutes are gone – modern SaaS and usage based billing comes with a raft of code for even the most common billing patterns, metering and entitlements. Developers end up spending too much time integrating and maintaining billing instead of shipping impactful features for their customers.

Launched in September 2024, Polar changes this with a Merchant of Record (MoR) billing engine designed for AI-native SaaS and the next generation of developers. Polar integrates with just six lines of code and obsesses over developer ergonomics for modern programming languages and frameworks, meaning the developers behind this new wave of AI-native businesses can onboard and start accepting payments globally in minutes – faster than any other solution on the market. Developers can also focus on scaling their software internationally while Polar handles global sales taxes for them.

To help developers monetize their products effectively, Polar comes with usage-based billing infrastructure that can automatically ingest customer events and token consumption from OpenAI or Anthropic to S3 consumption, data streams and more.

Developers can also use Polar to automate common SaaS entitlements and digital products in minutes – from license keys, file downloads, GitHub and Discord access to custom entitlements – and distribute them directly to customers, offering a simple pathway to upselling without the need to deal with sales tax or build these features yourself. Built by and for the open source community, Polar also comes with seamless connections to Framer, Raycast, and Zapier.

Founded by Birk Jernström – former Director of Product (Shop) at Shopify and ex-founder at Tictail (acquired by Shopify in 2018) – Polar launched its new billing platform in September 2024 and is now home to 16,000 developers monetizing their software. Average online sales have grown more than 120% month-on-month for the past six months, with customers including Bolt AI, Midday, OpenPanel and Repo Prompt. This seed funding will be used to expand the Polar team and accelerate Polar’s global growth by developing international relationships with developers and payments partners.

Birk Jernström, founder and CEO of Polar, said: “Our mission at Polar is to empower developers to ship faster and build businesses around their software – leaving billing and international sales tax headaches to us. We’re proud to be an open source, developer-first company and our focus over the past years has been entirely on building high-quality and innovative APIs, SDKs and products that help passionate coders monetize their software. This funding will help us to scale Polar up while maintaining this dedication to developers and their businesses, and we’re honored and thrilled to have Accel and incredible angels behind us on this next chapter.”

Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, said: “The reputation and traction that Polar already has in the developer community are extremely impressive, and it’s exciting to partner with such an experienced, product-focused founder as Birk on this investment. There is a new generation of AI-native, early-stage businesses that want to grow without distractions. There’s a clear opportunity for Polar’s open-source Merchant of Record to meet this need and become the best monetization platform for developers.”